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- Update updates your package index. Almost no chance of breaking your system.- Upgrade upgrades your system, minus the kernel. Usually pretty safe. There's usually not much reason to upgrade the kernel unless something isn't working.- Dist-upgrade upgrades everything. It also has the highest chance of breaking your system, but is still usually safe. This is what I do on my Main Edition laptop. I have completely broken it in the past by doing this.

I believe that updates for LMDE are released in "Update Packs" instead of immediately as with the main editions or Debian. If there's no update packs, then there's no updates.

When I decided to use LMDE for my main laptop, I was appealed by the statement that "I never have to upgrade the system again by a new install" (or something similar, dealing with a "rolling distribution").

LMDE works with UP's (Update Packs) most of the time, as said before and these UP's can be huge.

LMDE isn't a real, full or true rolling release... it's a so called semi- or cyclic-rolling release, due the UP's. Sometimes a few smaller updates are available, like a newer Firefox or some small mint specific updates.

Once your Update Manager is showing a blue circle with a exlamation mark in it, you know there are updates available. May it be a few updates or a UP......

You can install LMDE once, keep it up to date and if you don't mess around with your system too much, you actually shouldn't have to install it again for a long time.

So... if you kept your LMDE up to date, you won't have to do a single thing at all if it's still working well.

Since weeks, thunderbirds pops up a window saying "new update to 17.0.4" is available. When I press the update button, nothing happens. Also the LMDE updater does not update to a newer version. How can this be explained?

simplex wrote:Since weeks, thunderbirds pops up a window saying "new update to 17.0.4" is available. When I press the update button, nothing happens. Also the LMDE updater does not update to a newer version. How can this be explained?

The updates are released as update packs. This includes Thunderbird and the LMDE updater. If you want to update to the latest version of thunderbird, you will have to do it manually. Or you can use Icedove from the Mozilla Debian repositories. The same is true of Firefox/Iceweasel. They are essentially the same programs with differences you won't notice in normal use.

simplex wrote:Since weeks, thunderbirds pops up a window saying "new update to 17.0.4" is available. When I press the update button, nothing happens. Also the LMDE updater does not update to a newer version. How can this be explained?

Mozilla changed to a short release cycle. Firefox and Thunderbird can manage their own updates, instead of relying on distro maintainers.

I had this symptom with Thunderbird. My fix was to change the owner of the folder.